Ben Kaufman says it looks nice, arrived on time

Enquirer
reporters and editors should be satisfied with their initial tabloid
effort. Today’s inaugural edition — smaller and printed in Columbus — is
a curious hybrid. It arrived on time. It feels and looks like a
tabloid, but it reads like a familiar Enquirer rather than something
exciting and new.

That
might not be bad. Others — who haven’t spent 50-plus years in the newspaper
and wire service trade and worked on two tabloids — will decide whether
the tabloid Enquirer works well enough to buy. That’s important because
print ads bring in many times the cash of online ads.

Page
1 is a showcase. Catch the readers’ attention to turn them inside to
highly promoted stories. That’s tabloid. Enquirer designers have been
refining this for months on larger pages last printed yesterday.

Page
2 is weather and other stuff. My question: Will older readers complain
about the small type? Readers who need glasses probably are the
majority.

The
organization of the rest of the paper is familiar and most stories are
short. Good. Few stories today require more than that, especially one
that continues for days and weeks. Regular readers will learn enough.
Readers who are unsatisfied can learn more elsewhere without abandoning
the Enquirer. It would be no crime if longer versions appeared on Cincinnati.com. That could be a productive synergy.

If
there is a problem in the news pages, it’s the black/white inside news
photos. Sports suffers most. Too many are too small, too dark. That
could be an inking problem on the new Columbus Dispatch presses. If not,
it would be ironic if the new Enquirer format meant fewer inside color
photos and photographers having to relearn black-and-white photography.

And
small news photos. Here’s where the format cramps. A large photo
doesn’t leave much room for type and there is a limit to how many times
readers will go to another page to learn more about the pictured event.

The
special promotional section about the paper — with names and images of
the staff — is a keeper in addition to the existing online contact list.
It was good to see old colleagues and friends looking well and to put
faces to new names.

My
one complaint is that the shift in headline type. Now, news stories and
ads that imitate news stories now have the same or similar bold black
headlines. That’s bad. Previously, news and ads had starkly different
type faces. That was an honest effort to alert readers to the
difference. I hope the Enquirer will find a new type face for ads since the bold, black headlines work for tabloid news.

Having
nursed a new daily to life years ago, I still can recall the pleasure
of holding that first edition. I hope Enquirer journalists know that
feeling today.

•The
satirical website, The Onion, added kiddie porn to the Academy Awards. It tweeted about the 9-year-old Oscar nominee for Best Actress:
“Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is
kind of a cunt, right? #Oscars2013.”

Miss Wallis was nominated for Best Actress inBeasts of the Southern Wild.

Traditional
and new media exploded with contempt but few spelled out the “C-word.”
Most offered the first letter and asterisks: C***.

The
Onion took down the tweet in about an hour and Onion CEO Steve Hannah
crawled back on Facebook. He wrote, in part, “I offer my personal
apology to Quvenzhané Wallis . . . for the tweet that was circulated
last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive . . . No person
should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading
as satire.”

Hannah
wrote that “We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to
ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again. In addition, we
are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible.

“Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.”

•Ciao,
papa vecchio. Viva il papa nuovo! Did anyone else notice that Benedict
was driven to his helicopter in German cars? I didn’t recognize one
macchina italiana among the black sedans. At the helicopter, a papal
aide belted Pope Emeritus into his passenger seat. He knows the drill;
Benedict is a licensed pilot who has piloted a chopper from the Vatican
City to the summer villa at Castel Gandolfo. He left this flight to the
Italian Air Force. CBS followed Benedict’s chopper from liftoff to
arrival in suburban Castel Gandolfo about 15 miles southeast of Vatican
City. Boring video. Really boring. Obviously, CBS feared missing
something if anything went wrong. It’s the same reason the press
travels with the president...

•Unless
Benedict really wants to live out his days in the Vatican City, why
would he leave Castel Gandolfo? That lovely Alban Hills town was a
favorite for long lunches when I worked in Rome: a great view over Lago
Albano, wonderful pollo al diavolo and fresh trota.

•Most
Cincinnatians don’t read the Enquirer. They never did. However, they
often are affected by reporters watchdogging government and businesses
that rarely appreciate the attention. In recent years, no one was better
at this vital First Amendment function than the Enquirer’s Barry
Horstman. His coverage of the Cincinnati city pension fiasco and other
issues was vital to public awareness. He died last week after a heart
attack in the newsroom. Barry was a good man and a fine reporter. When
then-editor Tom Callinan hired Barry despite a chill on new hires, it
was a coup. The city gained a seasoned investigative reporter who
understood the necessity of depth in reporting and writing; quickie
stories don’t suffice when public millions are involved. After Barry’s
memorial service, Callinan told me, “It was an important message to the staff that while we may have fewer people we will have the best. He was that and more.”

•Randy
Mazzola and Julie Irwin Zimmerman have returned to the Enquirer. I’ve
worked with both; it’s good news. Randy is a talented graphic artist. If
the new tabloid format is to work, visuals are vital. Julie is a fine
reporter and writer. At different times, we both covered religion.

•I’ll
never understand the news media fuss about snow storms in the Plains
states and Midwest. It’s winter. Snow happens. Plows clear streets.
Kids slide. Image-hungry TV is the worst. They just don‘t get it. Sort
of like Cincinnatians who try to drive up Straight or Ravine streets or
West Clifton Avenue after an inch of snow. Those of us who grew up with
snow storms expect traffic snarls. We keep warm stuff in the trunk in
case we must drive but get stuck. We mumble, “I am not going to die of a
heart attack shoveling snow.” Then we shovel. Or hope a neighbor kid
tackles the job.

• Farmers
love snow. It melts and nourishes their crops, replenishes their wells
and waters their cattle. Blizzards can kill but drought is worse. This
by AP via the London Guardian: “Meteorologist Mike Umscheid of the
National Weather Service office in Dodge City, Kansas, said this latest
storm combined with the storm last week will help alleviate the drought
conditions that have plagued farmers and ranchers across the Midwest,
and could be especially helpful to the winter wheat crop planted last
fall. But getting two back-to-back storms of this magnitude doesn't mean
the drought is finished. ‘If we get one more storm like this with
widespread two inches of moisture, we will continue to chip away at the
drought, but to claim the drought is over or ending is way too
premature,’ Umscheid said.”

•I
don’t know the laws governing public records in South Africa, but two
inexplicably tardy news stories suggest that inattentive reporters were
dazzled by the premeditated murder charge against the Olympic gold medal
winner Oscar Pistorius. He’s the double amputee sprinter and that
nation’s most famous living athlete.

It
took days after Pistorius shot his girlfriend to report that Hilton
Botha, chief police investigator and disgraced star witness at
Pistorius’ bail hearing, already was charged with seven counts of
attempted murder arising from a traffic stop. Botha reportedly shot at
the van and its seven occupants and his bosses took him off the case
when the attempted murder charge made news.

•The
Oscar Pistorius murder case is perfect for the American news media:
hero athlete killer, lovely blonde victim. Oh, we’ve done that story.
Here’s a different angle for reporters: releasing Pistorius on bail
wasn’t a race issue; it’s what happens in almost any country where a
rich and famous person hires the best legal defense possible. Oh, we’ve
done that story. Repeatedly.

•Pistorius
is white, but even in race-conscious South Africa, fame and cash can
speak louder than color. If you doubt me, look up the criminal record of
Jacob Zuma, a black man and a longstanding leader in the ruling African
National Congress. A South African judge acquitted him of rape in 2006,
saying the unprotected sex was consensual. In 2005 and again in 2007,
Zuma was charged with corruption, racketeering and tax evasion.
Prosecutors dropped charges, saying political interference fatally
tainted their case. Zuma was elected president of South Africa in
2009.

•I
love a good hoax and "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" on YouTube was delicious.
Reactions illustrate the credulity of old and new media and people who
believe what they see/read online. BuzzFeed.com
freelancer Chris Stokel-Walker said the video got “17 million views
within a day, just shy of 42 million views in total, 14 million minutes
in viewing time in the U.S. alone, embedded on major news websites worldwide,
broadcast on morning talk shows and linked from countless message
boards — which proved this in historically impressive style.”

Stokel-Walker
traced the hoax to Professor Robin Tremblay’s video-effects class at
Centre NAD, a technology university in Montreal. “In October, he
challenged his students — as he did the previous two semesters — to make
a viral hoax video. If it got more than 100,000 views, then
congratulations, you got an A.”

Four
students created "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid." Twenty minutes after
showing the video to their class, they uploaded it to YouTube and
adjourned to a local bar.

Meanwhile,
Portuguese teenager Tiago Duarte spotted the hoax. "It looked so fake
to me," he told Stokel-Walker. "The main thing that gave it away was the
baby falling down. It really looked like a 3-D model to me." He went
online and "every single person was believing it, and the top comment at
the time was something like, 'If you want to say this is fake, you
better provide some proof.' So I did."

Stokel-Walker
said “it took the 17-year-old less than five hours to debunk a
month-and-a-half's worth of work. Duarte used his video editing skills,
uploaded his version of "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" to YouTube and proved
his point.

•Unintended
effects of a helter-skelter search for cheaper health care can be
deadly, as British news media have revealed. In a reality that recalls
Sarah Palin’s fantasy “death panels,” the British government is paying
incentives to hospitals to reduce the number of beds occupied by the
terminally ill.

One
response is for physicians to hurry patients into the hereafter by
withdrawing nourishment, hydration and medical treatment. Without
intended irony, Brits call this lethal option Liverpool Care Pathway
(LCP). Revelations are beyond sensational. Here’s part of a National Health Service press release:

“The
LCP is intended to allow people with a terminal illness to die with
dignity. But there have been a number of high-profile allegations that
people have been placed on the LCP without consent or their friend’s or
family’s knowledge. Concerns have also been raised about hospitals
receiving payments for increasing the number of patients who are placed
on the LCP . . . (A)s we have seen, there have been too many cases
where patients were put on the pathway without a proper explanation or
their families being involved.” Worse, some patients or families didn’t
give required permission.

•London’s Daily Mail, among those most actively pursuing the Liverpool Care Pathway story (above), wrote Sunday that:

“Leading doctors have claimed NHS
patients are being routinely placed on the controversial Liverpool Care
Pathway by out-of-hours medics who are ‘strangers’ who have never been
involved in their care. The claims suggest patients are often left to
die on . . . ‘bedside evidence’ alone and without fully understanding
the patients’ condition or medical history.

“The
LCP has been the subject of much debate since it was introduced in the
1990s. More than 130,000 people are put on it each year but it was
revealed in December 60,000 patients die on the procedure each year
without giving their consent.

“Concerns
have been raised that clinical judgments are being skewed by incentives
for hospitals to use the pathway. Health trusts (that run National
Health Service hospitals) are thought to have been rewarded with an
extra £30million ($45m) for putting more patients on the LCP. Critics
say it is a self-fulfilling prophecy because there is no scientific
method of predicting when death will come.”

•Here’s
a story that any reporter could do: did the advent of ubiquitous urban
and suburban school busing — for whatever reasons — cause or coincide
with the explosion of K-12 obesity? News media are full of obesity
stories bemoaning fat Americans and blaming everything from school
lunches, fat, salt and sugar to oversize portions of everything. Maybe,
just maybe, it has more to do with the end of walking or biking to
school.

•Death
cafes aren’t Starbucks spinoffs where philosophers and others have
spirited conversation as they sip soy milk hemlock lattes. (Gift cards
are one-use only.) Rather, death cafes are where people can talk about
what comes next. This growing movement appears to be news to
Cincinnati-area news media. Huffington Post tipped me to Columbus, Ohio,
leadership in the U.S. death cafe movement. Here’s some of what HuffPost
and others reported:

Ohioans
met on a Wednesday evening in a community room at a Panera Bread near
Columbus for tea, cake and conversation “over an unusual shared
curiosity. For two hours, split between small circles and a larger group
discussion, they talked about death: How do they want to die? In their
sleep? In the hospital? Of what cause? When do they want die? Is 105
too old? Are they scared? What kind of funerals do they want, if any? Is
cremation better than burial? And what do they need accomplish before
life is over?

Organizer
Lizzy Miles says the latest gathering included new and previous
attendees plus a public radio reporter. “I set the ground rules. No
recording during the Death Café. He had to participate as a regular guy.
Then afterwards, we would ask for volunteers as to who would be willing
to talk for radio. Several people volunteered and we had a mini Death
Café discussion . . . I felt he did a good job of capturing the essence
of the Death Café in his WOSU broadcast, ‘Columbus Death Cafe concept
Spreads Across the U.S’.”

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

• Giovanna Chirri, the veteran Vaticanista who understood
the pope’s Latin, broke the news that he’d just announced his
resignation. She works for the Italian news agency, ANSA. Her skill
recalled Ernest Sackler at Rome’s UPI bureau when I was a
photojournalist stringer during John XXIII’s papacy. Ernest truly
understood Vatican Latin well enough to turn it into flowing English;
colleagues spoke of him with awe.

• I’m grateful to the Enquirer for running a story on Sen.
Rand Paul’s response to the State of the Union Message. It wasn’t on
NPR or any other network that I could find. His Washington office did
not respond to my question of whether the Kentucky Republican offered his
remarks to any broadcasters/cable networks.

• Tens of millions of Americans will become eligible for
subsidized medical care under Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Who’s going
to treat them? I haven’t seen that in the news. And while reporters are
working out that story, ask how the required additional primary care
physicians will pay off college and medical school debts on the salaries
that will be paid to their specialties.

• And once journalists dig into the supply of physicians
to handle Medicaid expansion, I hope they’ll ask who’s going to staff
quality preschool education for every American child. Obama can be
aspirational, but we’re not talking about minimum wage diaper changers.
Early learning centers require trained pre-school educators. And while
they’re at it, reporters should ask where these new early childhood
educators will train and who’s going pick up the tab. After all, they’ll
never repay college loans on day care wages.

• Maybe I missed it in the admiring coverage of our
government killing American Islamists abroad with drone rocket attacks: What prevents Obama from killing Americans in this country with drone
strikes? None of the news stories or commentaries I’ve read or heard
addressed that point.

There would be no shortage of targets. Wouldn’t the
sheriff have loved a drone-launched missile to kill Christopher Dorner,
the rogue ex-LAPD cop? That might have spared the deputy whom Dorner
killed during the flaming finale in the San Bernardino mountains. And
what prevents our increasingly militarized police from using their own
armed drones?

Imagine what authorities could have done with armed drones during earlier, infamous encounters:

A missile fired at armed members of the American Indian
Movement at Wounded Knee, S.D., could have avenged inept, vain
and foolish George Armstrong Custer and FBI agents killed in the 1973
siege.

No feds would have died if a drone-launched missile
incinerated Randy Weaver’s family with during its deadly 1992
confrontation with feds at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

David Koresh and the Branch Davidian religious sect were
incinerated by the feds’ 1993 armored assault in Texas. That would have
been a perfect photo op for a domestic drone attack.

• Sometimes, “national security” is the rationale for requested or commanded self-censorship, even when secrets aren’t secret.

For instance, British editors held stories about Prince
Harry until he returned the first time from Afghanistan. However, an
Australian women’s magazine reported he was in combat. The non-secret
was a secret because no one paid attention.

More recently, the new U.S. drone base in Saudi Arabia was
supposed to be a secret. Obama officials asked major news media to hold
the story and they agreed. National security, you know.

But it wasn’t a secret. Washington Post blogger Erik
Wemple said Fox News already had reported U.S. plans to build the
facility in Sept. 2011. Three months before that, the Times of
London reported construction of the Saudi drone base.

When the New York Times broke the agreement and reported
the Saudi drone base, everyone jumped on the story. Now, the Times, the
Post and AP are trying to explain why they kept the non-secret from us.

• Gone are the days when senior Israeli government
officials could call in top editors and broadcasters and tell them what
they could not report. Last week, a tsunami of technology overwhelmed
official Israeli efforts to censor the story of Prisoner X. Israeli
journalists were not to report his existence or mention the censorship
order. National security, you know. However, an Australian network named
an Aussie as Prisoner X and said he reportedly committed suicide three
years ago in an Israeli prison. Social media and the online world took
it from there: "Aussie recruited by Israeli spy agency dies in Israeli
prison." Israel dropped efforts to censor the Prisoner X story and is
issuing official statements about the case.

• San Bernardino’s sheriff asked journalists to quit
tweeting from the final gunfight with former LAPD cop Christopher
Dorner. Bizarre. If authorities feared Dorner would gain tactical
information, they misread his situation: Dorner was surrounded in a
mountain cabin, tear gas was being lobbed in and men outside were
trying to shoot him. He probably was too busy to read tweets. Moreover,
only one reporter was close enough to tweet anything remotely useful to
anyone. Most reporters initially or finally ignored the sheriff.

The tweet issue first arose during the 2008 Muslim
terrorist attack on Mumbai when invaded the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Some
authorities reportedly feared accomplices outside were reading news
media tweets and forwarding tactical information about police and army
movements to gunmen inside. I don’t remember if anyone asked reporters
to quit tweeting.

• A new poll says Fox hit an alltime low for the four
years Public Policy Polling has tracked trust/distrust among TV
networks: 41 percent trust Fox, 46 percent do not. The poll didn’t find anything for
other networks to brag about. Only PBS had more “trust” than “distrust”
among viewers: 52 percent trust, 29 percent don’t trust. The poll questioned 800
voters by telephone from Jan. 31 to Feb. 3.

• Garry Wills’ new book, Why Priests, sets out to debunk
Catholicism’s dearest dogmas and doctrines concerning priests, bishops
and the papacy. NPR’s Diane Rehm gave him an hour last week to say why
Catholic ordained clergy are an unnecessary accretion. Then she asked an
outgunned parish priest from the Washington, D.C. area for a rebuttal.
If she really wanted a lively, informed argument, there is no shortage
of priest-scholars who could have matched Wills’ credentials and talents
as an historian. It was unfair and cringe-worthy.

• It’s touchy when an unpleasantry is brought up in an
obit: a long forgiven conviction, a “love child,” whatever. More often,
predictably awkward moments are omitted in the spirit of de mortuis nil
nisi bonum. Here’s HuffingtonPost on a full-blown omission in the recent
obit on former New York mayor and mensch Ed Koch:

“The New York Times revised its Friday obituary
. . . after several observers noticed that it lacked any mention of his
controversial record on AIDS. The paper's obituary, written by longtime
staffer Robert D. MacFadden, weighed in at 5,500 words. Yet, in the
first version of the piece, AIDS was mentioned exactly once, in a
passing reference to ‘the scandals and the scourges of crack cocaine,
homelessness and AIDS.’ The Times also prepared a 22-minute video on
Koch's life that did not mention AIDS. This struck many as odd; after
all, Koch presided over the earliest years of AIDS, and spent many years
being targeted
by gay activists who thought he was not doing nearly enough to stop the
spread of the disease. Legendary writer and activist Larry Kramer called Koch ‘a murderer of his own people’ because the mayor was widely known as a closeted gay man.”

• New York’s Ed Koch admired Wall Street Journal reporter
Danny Pearl’s recorded last words before Muslim terrorists beheaded him.
Koch had Pearl’s affirmation of faith engraved on his own tombstone in
Manhattan’s Trinity Church graveyard: “My father is Jewish, my mother is
Jewish, I am Jewish.”

• A former student reporter rarely rates an obit in the
national media, but Annette Buchanan wasn’t ordinary. In the mid-1960s,
she refused a court order to name sources for her story about student
marijuana use on the University of Oregon campus. Her story ran in the
Oregon Daily Emerald, the campus paper. No shield law protected her
promise of confidentiality. The Emerald said she was fined the maximum
$300 and the state supreme court affirmed her contempt of court
conviction. That led to the creation of Oregon’s shield law for
journalists. She died recently.

• An unresolved First Amendment issue is whether bloggers
can be protected by state shield laws that allow journalists to keep
sources secret. The latest case is from New Jersey. Poynter.com
said blogger Tina Renna refused to identify government officials whom
she said misused county generators after Hurricane Sandy. Union County
prosecutors demanded the 16 names, saying Renna wasn’t a journalist
protected by New Jersey’s shield law because she’s been involved in
politics, her blog is biased and she’s often critical of county
government.

The Newark Star-Ledger took her side. It said shield law protection “shouldn’t
hinge on whether someone is a professional, nonpartisan or even
reliable journalist. It’s a functional test: Does Renna gather
information that’s in the public interest and publish it? Yes.” Renna “can
be a little wild, she’s not the same as a professional reporter and she
drives local officials crazy. But part of democracy is putting up with
Tina Renna.” A court will probe whether Renna is a journalist as defined
by the state shield law; that is, whether bloggers can be included by
analogy under protected electronic news media.

• Few ledes — introductory sentences in news stories — are
as lame as those saying the subject “doesn’t look” like some
stereotype. For years, it usually referred to a woman in an
unconventional (read men’s) occupation or pastime. “She didn’t look
like a steelworker . . . “ or, “You wouldn’t think a tiny blonde bagged a
deadly wild boar with a huge .44 magnum revolver.” Male subjects aren’t
immune, as in this lede from a recent Washington Post story: “Farmer
Hugh Bowman hardly looks the part of a revolutionary who stands in the
way of promising new biotech discoveries and threatens Monsanto’s
pursuit of new products . . . ”

What do revolutionaries look like? Lenin was pictured in
suit and tie. Gandhi wore a white, draped sari or dhoti, Mandela and
fellow ANC rebels often wore suits and ties. Young 1960s American and
French student rebels never wore suits and ties and needed haircuts.
Today’s young North African activists dress the same for class or a
demonstration.

“Doesn’t look like” wouldn’t even fit an androgynous male
model in the annual Victoria’s Secret fashion show. He’d be there
because he looks like a classic, young, leggy “angel.”

• Have you noticed how hurricanes, floods, blizzards and
tornadoes are morphing from evidence of climate change into photo ops?
News media see them as so common that little reporting is required
beyond images and stories of hardship: shoppers hoarding sliced white
bread, downed trees and shattered homes, marooned airline passengers and
days without power. Maybe there’s the throwaway quote from some
climatologist about change affecting weather, but for the most part,
that’s it. I’m betting this deliberate ignorance is a Republican Party
plot to show that increasingly frequent, dangerous weather reflects the
Intelligent Design that gave us dino-riding cavemen a few thousand years
ago.

• The Enquirer devoted Page 1 to a dramatic OMG! graphic
and story suggesting Cincinnati was terrible because it had no black
candidate for mayor. An accompanying list of movers and shakers had few
blacks. The presentation suggested the all-white mayoral contest meant
amiss in a city where whites are the largest minority. However, whites
and blacks told reporters that leadership rather than color was foremost
among attributes they sought in a mayor. Moreover, with so many African
Americans in visible leadership roles in the city, having a black mayor
succeed a black mayor was less of an issue than the paper suggested.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

Be suspicious of statistics that suggest a reporter
doesn’t understand, doesn’t care or knowingly isn’t telling us
everything the numbers do. For instance, we have tens of thousands of
firearm deaths every year in our country. Uncritical reporting suggests
these are homicides that buybacks or proposed federal gun controls could
prevent or reduce. Nope. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
said there were 31,672 firearm deaths recorded in 2010, the last year
for which complete statistics are posted. Of those, 19,392 or 61 percent
were suicides, not homicides. The remaining 39 percent included accidents, fatal encounters with police, etc.

• Critical thinking was in short supply at the Senate
Judiciary Hearing where gun control foes testified. It’s sort of like
using a faux quote by Hitler to prove gun registration leads to
confiscation, which leads to socialism or worse. Gayle Trotter of the
Independent Women’s Forum told senators that “guns make women safer” and
a ban on assault-style weapons with high-capacity magazines would
endanger women.

To illustrate her case, Trotter cited 18-year-old Sarah
McKinley’s successful defense against an armed intruder near Blanchard,
Okla. Police there told CityBeat that she killed him with a
12-gauge pump shotgun, a classic hunting weapon owned by millions of
Americans. That was a good choice for McKinley but an unfortunate
example for Trotter; no one is suggesting that shotguns be included in
proposed gun controls.

Then, as if to prove that fewer Americans are hunting or
serving in the military and know what they’re talking about (also see
below), MSNBC mistakenly said she used a rifle. ABC News was no smarter:
It had her reenact the shooting with a double-barreled shotgun.

McKinley’s single-barrel pump shotgun was taken as
evidence in the homicide, probably to be returned when her claim of
self-defense is affirmed. Meanwhile, Guns Save Lives, a nonprofit, sent
her a similar, replacement shotgun.

Not only does Oklahoma allow lethal force for self-defense
inside a person’s home, but McKinley asked the 911 operator what she
could do to protect herself and her child. The dead intruder’s companion
reportedly told police the intruders were after prescription
painkillers that they assumed McKinley’s husband left when he died a
week earlier from cancer.

• A secret shooter? After Obama’s comments to the New
Republic about having fired a gun, the White House released a photo of
the president on the Camp David retreat skeet range. Wearing protective
glasses and ear protection, he’s firing a shotgun at the 4-5/16 inch
flying clay discs (pigeons) last August. "Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time," Obama told the New Republic. "Not the girls, but oftentimes guests of mine go up there." However, the AP story accompanying the skeet shooting photo in Sunday’s Enquirer
mistakenly says he’s firing a rifle. I’m not sure whether Obama used an
over-and-under shotgun, but it certainly didn’t look like a rifle. That
inexplicable clanger escaped AP and Enquirer editing despite our
unprecedented national debate over certain types of firearms. NRA
pooh-poohed Obama’s comments and photo, saying it changes nothing in NRA
opposition to greater gun control.

• John Kerry drew scorn in 2004 after he was photographed
with Ted Strickland and others with just-shot geese in an eastern Ohio
cornfield. Possibly recalling that ill-conceived effort to bond with
hunters, Obama didn’t release his skeet shooting photo before the
election last year. Kerry’s goose hunting was ridiculed as a dumb photo
op, especially because Kerry borrowed the farmer’s hunting outfit and
double-barreled shotgun for the day. Whether Kerry bagged any additional
rural voters was unclear; Bush won Ohio.

• I began contributing to the new National Catholic Reporter in the mid-’60s when I started covering religion at the Minneapolis Star. I freelanced for NCR when I had that same assignment at the Enquirer. A privately owned, independent weekly based in Kansas City, Mo., NCR was a voice of Roman Catholics who embraced the spirit as well as the documents of the Second Vatican Council.

Traditional churchmen had little reason to love NCR.
It was a pain in the ass and collection basket. It reported the flight
of clergy and nuns, often into marriage. Jason Berry pioneered reporting
of priestly child abuse. Penny Lernoux covered Latin American death
squads and links between murderous reactionaries and the church. Murders
of nuns, priests and bishops who embraced liberation theology and the
church’s “preferential option for the poor” received extensive, probing
coverage.

The bishop of Kansas City and a former diocesan editor,
Robert W. Finn, recently joined predecessors’ fruitless condemnations of
NCR’s journalism. In a letter to the diocese praising official
church media, Finn was “sorry to say, my attention has been drawn once
again to the National Catholic Reporter. … In the last months I
have been deluged with emails and other correspondence from Catholics
concerned about the editorial stances of the Reporter: officially
condemning Church teaching on the ordination of women, insistent
undermining of Church teaching on artificial contraception and sexual
morality in general, lionizing dissident theologies while rejecting
established Magisterial (official) teaching, and a litany of other
issues.

“My predecessor bishops have taken different approaches to
the challenge. Bishop Charles Helmsing in October of 1968 issued a
condemnation of the National Catholic Reporter and asked the publishers to remove the name ‘Catholic’ from their title — to no avail. From my perspective, NCR’s positions against authentic Church teaching and leadership have not changed trajectory in the intervening decades.

“When early in my tenure I requested that the paper submit their bona fides
as a Catholic media outlet in accord with the expectations of Church
law, they declined to participate indicating that they considered
themselves an ‘independent newspaper which commented on “things
Catholic.” ’ At other times, correspondence has seemed to reach a dead
end.

“In light of the number of recent expressions of concern, I
have a responsibility as the local bishop to instruct the Faithful
about the problematic nature of this media source which bears the name
‘Catholic.’ While I remain open to substantive and respectful discussion
with the legitimate representatives of NCR, I find that my ability to
influence the National Catholic Reporter toward fidelity to the
Church seems limited to the supernatural level. For this we pray: St.
Francis DeSales (patron of journalists), intercede for us.”

• Rarely have I seen such a neat dismissal of creationism
and defense of evolution as the following by 19th century skeptic Robert
Ingersoll. It’s quoted in a review of The Great Agnostic, a biography of Ingersoll, in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard:

“I would rather belong to that race that commenced a
skull-less vertebrate and produced Shakespeare, a race that has before
it an infinite future, with an angel of progress leaning from the far
horizon, beckoning men forward, upward, and onward forever — I had
rather belong to such a race … than to have sprung from a perfect pair
upon which the Lord has lost money every moment from that day to this.”

• The Weekly Standard also published “A teacher’s
Plea: The GOP shouldn’t write off educators.” Eloquent Colleen Hyland
speaks beyond partisanship for her vocation and colleagues in her Jan.
21 essay. Among other things, she hopes to shake Republican/conservative
ideologues out of their animus toward public school teachers and their
unions. Among her points: Hhateful generalizations about teachers and
their desire for a living wage also degrades women.

• I didn’t know Kevin Ash and I’m not a rider but I read his motorcycle reviews in London’s Daily Telegraph
for years. Details of his death in South Africa are unclear, but he
died during the media show testing the new BMW R1200GS motorcycle. His
informed, passionate writing was a delight for itself, even if I never
thought to get on a two-wheeler again. When I was what the Brits’ call a
“motoring correspondent,” my interest was cars, whether with three or
four wheels. There were a lot of us writing about cars and motor
racing/rallying in Europe and Britain in the 1960s; postwar Europeans
were getting into cars for the first time in most families’ lives. We
were read whether it was the test drive of an exquisite new Zagato OSCA
coupe (built by the original Maserati brothers) or a boring Opel
sedan. But getting killed during a test ride? Since most of us had some
inkling of what we were doing astride a motorcycle or behind the wheel,
that would have been very bad luck.

• Time Magazine’s world.time.com website posted this howler. The original Time story purported to look at Oxford and Cambridge roles in Britain’s social mobility. Appended to the online story, Time’s correction has a lawyerly tone. Here it is at length and verbatim:

“This article has been changed. An earlier version stated
that Oxford University accepted ‘only one black Caribbean student’ in
2009, when in fact the university accepted one British black Caribbean
undergraduate who declared his or her ethnicity when applying to
Oxford.

“The article has also been amended to reflect the context
for comments made by British Prime Minister David Cameron on the number
of black students at Oxford. It has also been changed to reflect the
fact that in 2009 Oxford ‘held’ rather than ‘targeted’ 21 percent of its
outreach events at private schools, and that it draws the majority of
its non-private students from public schools with above average levels
of attainment, rather than ‘elite public schools.’

“An amendment was made to indicate that Office for Fair
Access director Les Ebdon has not imposed but intends to negotiate
targets with universities. It has been corrected to indicate that every
university-educated Prime Minister save Gordon Brown has attended Oxford
or Cambridge since 1937, rather than throughout history. The proportion
of Oxbridge graduates in David Cameron’s cabinet has been updated —
following the Prime Minister’s September reshuffle, the percentage rose
from almost 40 percent to two-thirds. Percentages on leading Oxbridge
graduates have been updated to reflect the latest figures.

“The article erred in stating that private school students
have ‘dominated’ Oxbridge for ‘centuries.’ In the 1970s, according to
Cambridge, admissions of state school students ranged from 62 percent to
68 percent, sinking down to around 50 percent in the 1980s. The article
has been amended to clarify that although only a small percentage of
British students are privately educated, they make up one-third of the
students with the requisite qualifications to apply to Oxbridge.

“The article erred in stating that Oxford and Cambridge
‘missed government admission targets’ for students from lower
socioeconomic backgrounds. Rather, the universities scored below
‘benchmarks’ for admission of students from lower socioeconomic
backgrounds which are calculated by the Higher Education Statistics
Agency, a non-governmental body. The article was amended to clarify the
point that Cambridge continues to run Sutton Trust summer schools.

“The article mistakenly suggested that the current U.K.
government had launched an ‘initiative to reform Oxbridge.’ There was no
official initiative, but rather a marked push by the government to
encourage change. The article referred to Cambridge and Oxford’s efforts
‘in the past two years’ to seek out underprivileged students. In fact,
their commitment is far more long-standing — programs to reach out to
underprivileged students have been operating at the two universities
since at least the mid-1990s.

“The article erred in suggesting that Cambridge had
protested state school targets, and in stating that it had ‘agreed to’
ambitious targets, rather than setting the targets themselves that were
then approved by the Office of Fair Access. The article has been amended
to clarify that there is debate over whether the ‘school effect’,
whereby state school students outperform private school students at
university, applies to those at the highest levels of achievement, from
which Oxford and Cambridge recruit.

“The article has been changed to correct the misstatement
that a lack of strong candidates from poor backgrounds is not the
concern of Oxford and Cambridge. The article has amended the phrase
‘Oxford and Cambridge’s myopic focus on cherry-picking the most
academically accomplished,’ to more fairly reflect the universities’
approach.”

• Until I read the Time correction above, I’d
forgotten one in which I was involved. A young reporter covered a
Saturday national church meeting in suburban Cincinnati at which
denominational leaders argued how to respond to homosexuals in the pews
and pulpits. This was when such a discussion was courageous, regardless
of the views expressed. I edited the story. It was a good, taut story
and it ran in a Sunday Enquirer. All hell broke loose. The
reporter attributed exactly the opposite views to each person quoted.
Instead of a forthright correction, I recall running a new, corrected
story plus the apology.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

•Enquirer
reporter Sharon Coolidge’s use of open records law documented
Cincinnati’s lax enforcement of lead paint removal orders. She told
CityBeat that her coverage included positive impacts in addition to
those above in my main column:

The
day after her story was published, Mayor Mark Mallory ordered health
officials to explain why they hadn't forced problem landlords to clean
up their properties.

Three
public hearings led to a comprehensive city plan to eliminate childhood
lead poisoning by 2010. The plan lowers the medical threshold at which
health officials can intervene, thus catching lead poisoning in its
earliest stages.

City
Council gave the health department more than $1 million to finance
reforms. Poor families are getting kits to detect whether their homes
are contaminated.

In
one of his first acts as new governor, Ted Strickland allowed cities to
sue lead-paint producers; Cincinnati is suing Sherwin-Williams.

State
lawmakers are considering a new law, named after a family featured in
the Enquirer story, to provide $20,000 grants for lead removal.

•A
more recent public benefit from open records laws involved the Enquirer
suit to obtain secret streetcar vendors’ bids. Attorney Jack Greiner,
who handles First Amendment issues for the paper, said that Cincinnati's
ordinance requires bids be available for public review. Faced with
resistance, the Enquirer went to court. Hamilton County appellate judges
agreed with the paper, rejecting company arguments that records were
exempt from public records law as "trade secrets."

•Unless
you’re living under a Rock of Cliches, you’ve read or heard that flu is
sweeping the nation. Every sneeze, every cough, every chill and shiver
warns us that the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse is tethering his
pale horse at our curb. The catch is that despite breathless news media
offerings, little unusual is happening except for an early, aggressive
onset of the perennial scourge. Thousands die every year from flu, most
of them elderly. It would be news if we didn’t. Annual death estimates —
hampered by incomplete reporting and similar health problems — range
from 3,000 to 49,000.

•An
Enquirer Sunday Forum carried Michael Kinsley’s column about Hillary
Clinton’s extensive foreign travel as secretary of state. Kinsley doubts
the value of much of her travel but in today’s world, “The less
important the trip, the more prestige you gain by taking it.” Having
time and money to waste proves you have time and money to waste . . .
even if you’re on the taxpayers’ clock and paycheck. Maybe that
explains an otherwise inexplicable Enquirer revelation that Steve Chabot
is a foreign policy expert, citing his extensive foreign travel at
taxpayer expense.

•Enquirer
reporter Dan Horn produced two nay-saying front page stories. Both were
welcome surprises from Cincinnati’s “get on the team” daily. One questioned the argument that right-to-work laws provide an economic
boost in states like Indiana, Michigan, or, potentially, Ohio. That
anti-union policy was a staple topic in my 1950s high school debating
days. Economic analysis, like divining why crime rates change, is more
complicated than whether union membership is optional or required in a
“union shop.” Too many union/right-to-work debates — fueled by
no-compromise advocates putting re-election before public benefit —
ignore complexity.

•A
second invocation of skepticism by the Enquirer’s Dan Horn raised
serious doubts about feel-good gun buy-back programs. I’ll go this far
on guns: each firearm bought back and destroyed (not bought back and
sold to dealers for resale) is a gun that won’t kill someone. Cincinnati
Police destroy buy-back weapons not needed for investigations.
Buy-back, however, won’t change life on Cincinnati streets where scores
of young men kill each other each year. Anyone who wants a firearm can
get one faster than you can say, “Your money or your life.” Similar
doubts about Cincinnati’s gun buy-back program made Page 1 of the New
York Times.

•Fox
19’s Dave Culbreth came up with a smart take on the controversial idea
of arming teachers and school administrators. He interviewed Target
World assistant manager Amy Hanlon who demonstrated how a woman could
carry a concealed handgun. As Culbreth noted, there was nothing special
about her clothing: slacks, blouse, overshirt. By the end of the
interview, she’d removed nine concealed semi-automatics or revolvers,
including one tucked under her bra in a holster that also was displayed
on a counter-top mannequin bust.

•WCPO-TV plans an online local news challenge to the Enquirer’s Cincinnati.com,
according to Business Courier’s Jon Newberry. It’s a pioneering effort
by Cincinnati-based E. W. Scripps that could go national, Newberry
suggested. Whether additional reporters, producers, editors, etc., will
come from the Business Courier and other established news media was not
clear. Scripps — a Cincinnati-based national print and broadcast company— published the Cincinnati Post until it closed the barely-sustaining
joint operating agreement with the Enquirer ended in 2007.

•Blogger
Peter Heimlich tipped me to Channel 19 anchor Ben Swann’s web gig
called Full Disclosure. Swann says there are enough witnesses to
challenge official police narratives of single shooters at three recent
massacres: the Oak Creek, Wis., Sikh temple; Aurora, Colo., Batman movie
premiere, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Salon.com challenged Swann about his apparent validation of those counter-narratives and he replied in part, “The
bottom line for me is the issue of asking questions. As you will
notice, I don’t call these operations ‘false flag’ as many people do …
(his ellipses) But as a journalist, that is not my job. Rather, my job
is to be a critical thinker.” And he added, “most of our media fail to question stories . . . a journalist’s job is not to have the answers, it is to ask the questions and search for truth.”

•There’s
a pathetic undercurrent in the Enquirer’s Monday Page1 profile of
Henry Heimlich’s efforts to regain American Red Cross support for his
eponymous “maneuver.” The physician claims there is no research to
support the Red Cross’s decision to return to back slaps rather than
Heimlich abdominal thrusts as first response to choking. Other than
Heimlich’s self-serving claims, there is no research proving his
maneuver works as well or better than back slaps. Assertions are not
evidence. Moreover, the Red Cross adopted Heimlich’s maneuver years ago
without the research Heimlich is calling for now. Heimlich has
anecdotal evidence of lives saved but that’s not research. Wisely,
reporter Cliff Radel quoted skeptics and critics of the maneuver. That
kind of even-handedness usually escapes admiring Enquirer stories about
Heimlich. And if the paper ever corrected a Memorial Day feature on
water safety, I missed it. The Enquirer drew national ridicule with its
illustration on how to use Heimlich’s maneuver to revive a standing
near-drowning victim.

•It’s
spitting into the wind to ask sports reporters to question what jocks
tell them, especially when truth-telling endangers future access. In the
Good Old Days, who read about fornicating, drunken and racist
professional athletes? More recently, golf reporters and publications
didn’t write about married Tiger Woods’ screwing around. This time, it’s
Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o’s stories about the heart-ripping
death of girlfriend Lennay Kekua from leukemia. Editors loved it. Now,
it seems she was a fiction amplified by incurious and credulous
reporters. It took sports blog Deadspin.com
to reveal the fraud after its reporters could find no public records of
her birth, life, education or death. Almost as nauseating as the
saccharine original stories about her death are the faux introspection
by sycophant reporters caught by the fraud.

•We’ve
gone a week without a promo for Oprah’s interview with champion
liar-cheater Lance Armstrong. That’s closure. So what does Armstrong do
now? Pitch performance enhancing drugs and blood transfusions on ESPN
and late TV?

•Al
Gore sold his troubled Current cable network to Al Jazeera, the
satellite network based in Qatar in the Persian Gulf. Good. Nothing bars
foreigners from owning a cable network here, unlike the law that forced
Australian Rupert Murdoch to obtain U.S. citizenship after he bought Fox.

Backed
by the ruling Qatari emir, Al Jazeera scandalized Americans for
broadcasting tirades by Osama bin Laden and other anti-western Arab
leaders. We should have welcomed what they said in Arabic for home
audiences. Too often, we rely on sanitized remarks for
non-Arabic-speaking audiences or Washington assurances it was trying to
verify that speakers were who they said they were. Al Jazeera also
infuriated Arab audiences by carrying interviews with American and
Israeli officials that others in the Middle East ignored or rejected.

Most
American cable companies won’t carry the newer Al Jazeera English but
its website is one of my daily stops, especially when, say, AQIM kidnaps
oil workers in Algeria or French Legionnaires assist Mali’s pathetic
army in trying to halt and turn back Islamist rebels.

Al
Jazeera coverage of “Arab Spring” was so aggressive that embattled
North African rulers correctly accused it of supporting anti-government
demonstrators. So is Al Jazeera open to interference by the Qatari
government? Yes. Are its biases plain to anyone who listens or reads?
Yes. We don’t ignore Fox News for its biases.

•American
news media employ local nationals in foreign bureaus for their contacts
and language skills. That reliance failed when no one reported the 2010
anti-semitic rant by Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who
now is Egypt’s president. In part, Morsi called Jews “apes and dogs” and
shared the fantasy that the Palestinian Authority was “created by the
Zionist and American enemies for the sole purpose of opposing the will
of the Palestinian people and its interests.”

Still
nastier, he urged listeners “to nurse our children and our
grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews . . .
bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the
descendants of apes and pigs.”

A
stump speech in his Nile Delta hometown, it took more than two years to
reach English-language news media. The original Arabic video is on
YouTube now. I encountered a translation of Morsi this month on a Forbes
website that, in part, chided the New York Times for missing or killing
the story. Days later, it was on Page 1 of the Times. After that, the
Obama administration an official “tut-tut.”

•Maybe
they’ll blame one of those ominous Canadian Cold Air Masses
(meteorological, not theological) for the brain freeze that disabled
news judgment at the Toronto Star. Flippant columns about rape aren’t
funny. Jimromenesko.com
posted these first two paragraphs of Rosie DiManno’s column about
testimony during the sexual abuse trial of a local physician:

“She lost a womb but gained a penis.

“The former was being removed surgically — full hysterectomy — while the latter was forcibly shoved into her slack mouth..."

•Headlines
are an art that always risks a step too far in an attempt to cure the copy editor boredom and draw readers to a story. This one, from philly.com,
achieves both in what has become a national story about a popular and
well-connected parish pastor: “Catholic priest/meth dealer liked sex in
the rectory.” You know you’d read more.

•Finally,
this from Shannyn Moore, who blogs on HuffPost as “Just a Girl from
Homer, Alaska.” It appeared first in the Anchorage Daily News and makes
her points without venturing beyond the pale into bad taste: “I'm
not advocating for no guns. I like mine and am not about to give them
up. But in this country, my uterus is more regulated than my guns. Birth
control and reproductive health services are harder to get than
bullets. What is that about? Guns don't kill people — vaginas do?”

New restrooms stalled, Medicaid expansion saves money, there is no “climate debate”

City Council wants to do more research
before it proceeds with freestanding public restrooms in downtown
and Over-the-Rhine. The vote has been delayed. Critics say
the restrooms are too expensive at $130,000, but supporters, particularly Councilman Chris Seelbach, insist the
restrooms will not be that expensive. A majority of City Council argues
the restrooms are necessary because increasing populations and growth in
downtown have made 24-hour facilities necessary.

A new report found Ohio’s budget would benefit from a Medicaid expansion.
The expansion would mostly save money by letting the federal government
pick up a much larger share of the cost for Ohio’s population, particularly prison
inmates. A previous study
found Medicaid expansions were correlated with better health results,
including decreased mortality rates, in some states. Another study from
the Arkansas Department of Human Services found the state would save
$378 million by 2025 with the Medicaid expansion. Most of the savings from the Arkansas study
would come from uncompensated care — costs that are placed on health
institutions and state and local governments when uninsured patients
that can’t and don’t pay use medical services.

The Dayton Daily News has a wonderful example of how not to do journalism. In an article on the supposed “climate debate,”
the newspaper ignored the near-unanimous scientific consensus on global warming and decided to give credence to people who deny all
scientific reasoning. To be clear, there is no climate debate. There’s the overwhelming majority of scientists, climatologists and data on one side, and there’s the
pro-oil, pro-coal lobby and stubborn, irrational conservatives who will
deny anything that hurts their interests on the other side.

The Ohio Board of Education approved policies for seclusion rooms.
The non-binding policy requires parents to be notified if their
children are placed in a seclusion room, and the Ohio Department of
Education can also request data, even though it won’t be made public. More
stringent policies may come in the spring. Seclusion rooms are supposed
to be used to hold out-of-control kids, but an investigation from The Columbus Dispatch and StateImpact Ohio found the rooms were being abused by teachers and school staff for their convenience.

If the city wants to buy Tower Place, the mall will have to be cleared out, according to City Manager Milton Dohoney.
Last week, the remaining businesses at Tower Place were evicted, and
Dohoney said the city did not sign off on the eviction orders. Apparently, the
city really didn’t agree to or enforce eviction orders, but the city’s buyout requires
evictions. Dohoney said the eviction notices should signify the
deal to buy Tower Place is moving forward.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

•Here’s
a story for local health/medicine reporters: why is Christ Hospital
reducing service at its outpatient cardiac rehab center? Recently,
patients received this bizarre letter:

“In order to continue the highest level of care for our growing patient volume, we have adjusted our office hours. Effective January 2nd, 2013, (sic)
hours of operation for Phase II cardiac rehabilitation will be Monday,
Wednesday and Friday, 6:00 AM through 4:00 PM. Hours on Tuesday and
Thursday will be 6 AM to 2:30 PM. Thank you for choosing The Christ
Hospital Health Network.”

That
significantly shortens the afternoon/evening hours daily for a “growing
patient volume.” Didn’t anyone read this Orwellian language before it
went out over an exec’s signature on hospital letterhead? To continue
the highest level of care Christ will provide less, especially if
patients need outpatient cardio rehab after work?

If
outpatient rehab has too few clients, are cardiologists and cardiac
surgeons at this aggressively marketed heart hospital urging patients to
work out at the Mount Auburn facility? Aren’t these docs telling us to
quit smoking, lose weight and exercise more?

It’s
not a question of the quality of the care by therapists and RNs at the
outpatient rehab center; if it were, it would be closed.

•The
Sunday Enquirer carried a valuable column on Dec. 30 on what Ohio laws
passed in 2012 mean. Picked up from the Columbus Dispatch, it’s a marvel
of brevity and clarity and it proves there still can be substance
inside the Sunday Enquirer Local section.

•In
the Good Old Days, the Enquirer would fill local pages with “evergreen”
stories written before holiday slow news days. If these timeless trivia
weren’t used, they could be spiked or recycled for future fallow news
days. Today, evergreens apparently have been tossed on the editorial
pyre while this metropolitan daily’s diminished staff is filling its
shrunken news hole with staff and reader pet photos.

•God
help the Enquirer photographer who brings in a horizontal (“landscape
format”) photo for page A1. It won’t fit. Formulaic layout has ads and
promos bannered across the top and bottom, a deep multi-column vertical
photo or graphic on the left and a little bit of news beside and beneath
that photo or illustration. It seems to be the same every day,
regardless of events. It hardly qualifies as design. Cover pages on the
Local section fare no better. My guess? The format saves thinking every
day about how best to present the news (“content” or “product”) for
remaining page editors at some central Midwest location.

•The
Nation offers evidence-based insights into school shootings from
Katherine S. Newman, coauthor of Rampage: The Social Roots of School
Shootings and dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins.

For
starters, teach kids it’s right, good and potentially life-saving to
tell adults when other children or teenagers talk about killing,
shooting, etc. Peers of potential killers are our best early warning
system.

Newman’s
research also rebuts NRA’s grandiose goal of an armed “guard” in every
school; most schools are unlikely to become killing grounds. She wrote:

“These
shootings tend to happen in small towns with no history of background
violence rather than in big cities which suffer almost every other kind
of brutal attack except this one. There has been only one example of a
rampage school shooting in an urban setting since 1970. All the others
have taken place in rural towns miles from places like New York or
Chicago, or in suburbs in the Western states.”

Paducah, Ky.,
was one of the towns that her team studied after Goth-wannabe Michael
Carneal shot five Heath High School classmates: three died, one is
paralyzed and another was badly wounded.

Newman’s
research reflects that of many others in describing Carneal as typical
of school shooters. He was a nerdy young white male who couldn’t make
lasting friendships and never fit in at school or in his
football-worshiping community. He was looking for acceptance and
“shooting people is drawn straight from the Hollywood playbook that
equates masculinity with violence.”

Carneal
talked a lot about shooting and killing but no one risked being called a
snitch by alerting his parents or adults at school.

•What
Were They Thinking? Gannett’s Journal News in suburban New York went
online with the names and addresses of handgun permit holders in two
counties in its circulation area. The paper says it will sue to force a
third county to provide that information. The paper claims the list and
accompanying interactive map showing permit holder’s locations are a
public service. Malarkey. Horse puckey. Madness. So what if the data
come from public records? So do names of men and women who claim to be
victims of sex crimes. We don’t publish that. So what is a reader
supposed to do with the handgun information? Cui bono?

Wingnuts
spin wild fantasies about burglaries to obtain handguns from permit
holders or burglars hitting homes where no one has a conceal/carry
permit. My problem is different:
it’s hard enough to wrest public documents from dim and self-serving
officials. Decisions by the Journal News can’t help but undermine
remaining public support for investigative/database reporting.

The
Enquirer, Louisville Courier Journal and Indianapolis Star also are
Gannett papers. I hope the Journal News' perversion of First Amendment
assertiveness doesn’t become a route to Gannett corporate rings for
editors and publishers. (My name will appear if the Enquirer identifies
permit holders in its circulation area. I took the class, passed the
exam and obtained my permit for a cover story a year after Ohio allowed
counties to issue conceal/carry permits.)

•Anger
over the Gannett paper’s online posting of names and addresses of
handgun permit holders (above) quickly morphed into online retaliation.
Some critics posted what they said was the home address and photo of
Gannett corporate CEO Garcia Martore. Other Gannett execs’ home
addresses have been posted and bloggers have listed home addresses and
contact information for staffers at the Journal News. The paper has
hired guards for its Westchester headquarters. If guards aren’t active
law enforcement officers, they must have handgun permits and could be
included in lists published by the paper.

•The
daily Brattleboro Reformer bannered this headline across page 1
recently: “Let is snow, let is snow, let is snow.” Executive editor Tom
D’Errico told romenesko.com
that it was a “terrible, terrible typo. The night crew was
short-staffed and we had an unusual last-minute early deadline with the
storm marching in.” Later, he wrote in his blog: “I kept running over
the reasons in my mind . . . of how or why a mistake like this can and
does happen. But everything just sounded like an excuse. And the truth
is: there is no excuse.”

•Ailing
former President George H.W. Bush had one of those “greatly
exaggerated” brushes with eternity recently. (That now-a-cliche
expression originated in Mark Twain’s response to a reporter who
confused him with ailing cousin James Ross Clemens. Snopes.com says Twain actually told the reporter, “The report of my death was an exaggeration” but added “greatly” in a manuscript.)

Back
to Bush the Elder. Houston’s WBAP-AM blasted an email saying, “The
Death of a President: George H. W. Bush.” Romenesko and Texas Observer
reported that news director Rick Hadley blamed the error on a common
practice among news media: “We get our obituaries ready to go for people
who aren’t doing well.” When Bush entered a local hospital’s ICU, WBAP
prepared an email blast for his death. Hadley said a problem with the
email system sent the death message to about a third of the station’s
subscribers. Thirty minutes later — after callers alerted the station to
its misstep — WBAP quickly sent out a corrected email. Hadley said the
bulletin was not read on the radio.

WBAP
was typical of smart news media: It updates obits of prominent men and
women to avoid being unprepared when the inevitable occurs. Unfailingly,
that’s on deadlines when staff is short and sources are unavailable
because of holidays or late/early hours. These advance obits have blanks
for timely details: age, cause of death, where the person died and a
credible confirmation of death. Then they are filed in ways meant to
prevent all-too-common premature release.

That caution didn’t prevent Germany's respected news weekly Der Spiegel from mistakenly publishing Bush’s obituary in late December. AP said, “The
unfinished obituary appeared on Der Spiegel's website for a few minutes
before it was spotted by Internet users and removed. In it, the
magazine's New York correspondent described Bush as ‘a colorless
politician’ whose image only improved when it was compared to the later
presidency of his son, George W. Bush.” A Der Spiegel Twitter feed
said, "All newsrooms prepare obituaries for selected figures. The fact
that the one for Bush senior went live was a technical mistake. Sorry!"

Years
ago at UPI, we put out HOLD FOR RELEASE obituaries of leading figures
worldwide. Some of our client media saved the incomplete obits to await
news of the death. Others removed mention of death and often published
them as space-filling weekend feature stories.

The
Associated Press doesn’t send out advance obits as a practice but Dan
Sewell, AP’s correspondent in Cincinnati, noted a different problem:
the subject outlives the byline reporter. Last year, New York Times
ombuds Margaret Sullivan wrote generally about obits after talking to
obit editor Bill McDonald and touched on that problem: “Occasionally,
the author of the obituary was already dead by the time the piece ran – Vincent Canby on Bob Hope and Mel Gussow on Elizabeth Taylor,
for example. Mr. McDonald said that in most cases when an obit subject
outlives the writer, The Times does a new piece. ‘But in select cases,’
he added, ‘we feel the obit is too fine to discard, particularly if it
is by a writer who brings a certain authority to it.’ The Times assigns a
live body to update the obit and, in the case of Mel Gussow, offered a
note to the reader acknowledging the status of the author.”

•We’ve
all won another battle to hold cops accountable. The American Civil
Liberties Union sued to preempt Chicago police who object to an ACLU
project on police accountability. ACLU wanted to make sure its employees
wouldn’t be busted for recording officers’ words. The federal appellate
court in Chicago said we all share a First Amendment right to record
what police say to us. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the
Chicago police appeal, affirming the lower court ruling. Earlier last
year, federal courts said we have a right to photograph police in
public. My guess is dimmer, bolder police everywhere will continue to
arrest reporters who record their words and others who photograph their
actions. That’s not futile. The possibility of an arrest record — even
knowing the charge will be tossed by a judge or prosecutor — can be
intimidating and leave cops free of scrutiny.

•Let
Congress obscure methods and goals in naming legislation but reporters
should challenge any legislator who talks about “preventing” gun
violence.

We can’t prevent it. With some nuts among
the 300-plus million living in this country and almost nonexistent mental
health programs, some killers will find and use firearms on other
people. We can’t prevent it. That we have hundreds of millions of
firearms makes massacres even likelier. Reporters should press
vote-seeking legislators on how their proposed restrictions will limit
casualties from inevitable firearm violence. That brings us back to the
1994 restriction on high-capacity magazines for semi-automatic weapons.
Hunting weapons and pistols for self-defense don’t need or use them.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

•How
a small weekly responds to an unimaginable disaster and scores a world
scoop is a lesson in the best of journalism. Poynter online’s Julie Moos
described what happened after Newtown Bee associate editor Shannon
Hicks heard the initial call over her police scanner.

Hicks
drove the mile and a quarter and arrived behind the first dozen police
officers. She started taking photographs through her windshield and
captured her image of a line of children being led away from the
slaughter. “I’m conflicted,” Hicks
said about her photo. “I don’t want people to be upset with me, and I do
appreciate the journalists, especially, who have commented, saying
‘We’re just documenting the news.’ It’s harder when it’s in your
hometown and these are children we’re gonna watch grow up, the ones who
made it. I know people are gonna be upset, but at the same time I felt I
was doing something important.”

Fellow
editor John Voket explained what was behind that image. “Police and
school system have a protocol” for evacuation. “Children get into a
conga line, shoulder to shoulder, and the only person that’s allowed to
keep their eyes open is the locomotive at the front of the line, usually
an adult. And every other kid has to keep their eyes closed from the
minute they were exiting the classroom to when they got about a couple
hundred yards into the parking lot.”

•Voket
arrived about 20 minutes later and colleague Hicks “passed the baton”
to him. Hicks also is a volunteer firefighter. The firehouse is next to
the school. “I literally put on my firefighter gear . . . I was there as
a firefighter probably for not even more than 20 minutes before my
editor said he wanted me back in the office to work with him to
coordinate coverage from there.”

•Voket
continued reporting, but “We operate a little differently because our
job is to take care of the community so we were inside helping to
comfort victims and trying to provide human support without necessarily
making reporting the No. 1 priority. The publisher came down to
comfort some of the families a little later in the day.” R. Scudder
Smith has been Bee publisher since 1973; he is the fourth member of his family to run The Bee
since they founded it in 1877. The paper, which has a full-time
editorial staff of eight, circulates to about two-thirds of the
community of about 29,000.

•It
was Friday and the weekly Bee front page was ready to print. It couldn’t
be changed. “We’ve been putting everything on our website,” publisher
Smith told AP.

Voket
added that the traffic surge repeatedly crashed the website until the
Bee acquired “an intermediary service to supersize our bandwidth . . .
We got back up and running this (Saturday) morning.” The staff used
social media to spread information about school lockdowns, re-routed traffic, and grief counseling.
“Facebook and Twitter accounts have been a lifeline to our community
and it shows because 20 percent of the community are following us.” The
Bee also was “looking at doing a special extra to be on the newsstands
Monday.”

•For
those of us outside Newtown, Conn., we can turn to the renewed duel over
gun control. If it were a song, tired and familiar gun control lyrics
would be among “Worst Hits Ever.” It didn’t take long for gun control
advocates to embrace the Sandy Hook massacre and the bellicose NRA to
opt for rare silence. Obama renewed his unredeemed calls for gun
control although he and Mitt Romney dodged the issue in the just-ended
campaign. It was a hornets’ nest neither man opted to kick and reporters
apparently were unable to raise with the candidates.

•After
the Sandy Hook slaughter, fair and balanced Fox News banned discussion
of gun control from the cable network. Maybe Fox News feared we really
would decide if they really reported. New York magazine said the ban spotlights
the “growing chasm between Rupert Murdoch and [Fox News president]
Roger Ailes.” Ailes reportedly is a gun enthusiast. Murdoch, CEO of News
Corp., which owns Fox News, had tweeted a call for stricter gun
control, imploring for “some bold leadership action” from Obama.

•Let
me be churlish when everyone else is sympathizing with families,
survivors and first responders. Slaughtering 20 children is awful, but
reporters and editors are familiar with how badly Americans treat urban,
suburban, small town and rural children every day. In Obama’s Chicago
and many other urban areas, gunfire is an omnipresent fact of childhood.
Possibly one-fourth of all American children live in poverty as defined
by federal guidelines. For these kids, federally funded school meals
might be more than a complement to home meals. Health care for poor and
malnourished children isn’t much better than their educations. Medicaid
is among the anti-poverty programs high on the GOP priorities for
absolute cuts and/or reduced annual increases. And let’s not even get
into continuing coverage of physical and sexual child abuse, trafficking
minors and lifelong handicaps from poor or nonexistent prenatal care or
maternal drug and alcohol abuse.

•Only
foolish or ignorant reporters credit pious assertions that legislation
can prevent disturbed individuals from obtaining guns and killing as
many people as they can. There are more than 310 million people in this
country. Some are or will become seriously mentally disturbed and obtain
one or more of the hundreds of millions of firearms Americans own. A
Columbine or Sandy Hook could happen again any day.

•Focusing
on the shooting victims rather than shooters might reduce any copycat
effect. Stories and photos elevating killers to celebrity have been
blamed for further rampages. Even though the killer never was
identified, that was the inference drawn from Tylenol poisonings 30
years ago; copycats tried to poison Tylenol capsules. When coverage
began to fade, so did copycat crimes.

•NRA
leaders realized years ago that traditional (and valuable) Eddie Eagle
gun safety comics and courses were insufficient to motivate and keep
members and their dues. Fear and anger would be more effective. Real and
imagined government controls became NRA’s cause. Few modern American
movements have been as durable and effective as the NRA.

•NRA
is powerful because we are a democracy. It can mobilize more than 4
million members and fellow travelers as voters, donors and voices in the
news media. Elected representatives who want to keep their jobs quite
reasonably try to avoid the NRA’s opposition. Gun control advocates
evince nothing like this single-minded devotion to their cause.

•In
1994, the Clinton administration won a10-year limit on the sale of
assault-style weapons and large capacity magazines for their ammunition.
I went to a gun store in Hamilton to cover a rush to beat the ban.
Chinese assault-style rifles and curved high-capacity magazines were
selling as fast as staff could pry open crates. As I watched, the price
rose $10 with each new crate: demand and supply. Men who talked to me
said they were buying because of the imminent controls on assault-style
rifles and high-capacity magazines. A few admitted fear of civil unrest
or some undefined federal assault. Most said they wanted a
military-style rifle for shooting targets or empty beer cans and this
might be their last chance.That 10-year ban died in 2004 when
Republicans owned all three branches of federal government and didn’t
seek renewal. However, recent killings that required assault-style
weapons with large-capacity magazines might prompt reconsideration of
the ban. Adam Lanza reportedly carried hundreds of rounds of ammunition
in high-capacity magazines. No one knows why he didn’t use them.

•Any
gun control measure that’s not DOA will have to respect millions of
long guns — rifles and shotguns — used by hunters, farmers and others.
That distinction is an important part of this story already handicapped
by the paucity of journalists who hunt or otherwise own firearms.

•In
addition to an unfamiliarity with firearms, partisan hyperbole also
handicaps writing about guns and gun control. It can be hard to find
neutral sources who share reporters’ interest in accurate coverage.
Stenographic reporting giving “both sides” isn’t good enough;
journalists must know enough to challenge obvious partisan
misstatements. We are not obligated to report what we know to be untrue
or to label it as such.

•Unfamiliarity
with gun control cropped up in a recent Enquirer story about a failed
armed robbery attempt inside a suburban Sunoco station. Employees with a
handgun and a shotgun fatally wounded the would-be bandit. The Enquirer
story said it was unclear whether the employees had conceal-carry
licenses for those firearms. Unless someone somehow cloaked a shotgun’s
18-28” barrel, no conceal/carry permit is required. Unless the other
Sunoco clerk carried the pistol under his clothes, he didn’t need a
permit. Wearing it openly or storing it under the counter does not
require a conceal/carry permit. So what was the point of that line in
the story? Just because a cop might have said it doesn’t mean the
reporter had to share it. That’s what I’m talking about.

•Missing
in much gun control coverage is Congress’ inability to craft sensible,
workable bipartisan gun control specifics that can survive NRA
opposition and Supreme Court scrutiny. Firearm confiscation is out of
the question. So is universal registration which raises NRA-orchestrated
fear of confiscation — by ATF, the UN or some other demon de jour — to hysteria. Moreover, the court affirmed an individual Second
Amendment right to own guns in 2010 but it did not rule out federal,
state or local regulations governing firearm use.

•Reporters
faced with new rage over shootings should remind partisans that we have
gun control already. Forty nine states issue conceal/carry permits but
specify where those handguns may not be carried. Illinois — State No.
50 — is under court order to replace its ban with a conceal/carry
permit system. Many if not most municipalities bar gun owners from
firing their weapons within city limits with the exception of
self-defense. States commonly limit when hunters can use rifles and/or
shotguns and they can require a certain size bullet for large-game
hunting. Landowners may bar hunters from their property during
state-sanctioned hunting seasons.

There
are federal limits on how short a “sawed off” shotgun or rifle barrel
may be. There are laws limiting ownership of silencers and fully
automatic machine guns and submachine guns. Federally licensed firearms
dealers must run background checks on prospective buyers and turn away
those who fail or won’t comply. Dealers can deny convicted felons a gun
under federal and many state laws. A legal purchaser may not buy a
firearm for someone who would fail a federal background check.
Mentally-ill customers can be turned away by dealers.

•Few
of the roughly 12,000 Americans shot to death annually are killed with
shot with shotguns or rifles. They’re shot with pistols. So when gun
control is promoted, reporters should press advocates to say what they
mean: handguns.

• Before reporters share the lunacy of arming
teachers, ask local cops how many rounds typically are fired from their
handguns in an armed encounter . . . and how many of those bullets hit
their target. Not many. It's very, very difficult for someone trained
even at the level of police to accurately fire when adrenaline is
pumping. The teacher might end up shooting more students than the
intruder. Better to count on the low probability of an armed intrusion.
Think about how rare this is. Awful when it happens, but very, very
rare, even in communities where other shootings are far more frequent.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

•As much
as I usually enjoy Krista Ramsey’s controlled, empathetic reporting and
writing, I don’t understand why Enquirer editors wasted her talent and
their limited space on their serial about a bank-robbing granny. Who
cares? If I learned anything, it was from the front page dedicated to
the start of the serial. It was pure, screaming tabloid and perfect
practice for the day the Enquirer shrinks its page size again.

•The
Enquirer discovered a foreign policy “expert” living silently among us
for years. That’s their word: “expert.” He was outed on Monday’s page 1
in a lavishly illustrated story about his taxpayer-paid travels. It’s
U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot. Face it, travel doesn’t make anyone an expert.
If it did, Rick Steves should be our next Secretary of State.

•Here
we go again. Our Enquirer carrier is supposed to deliver the Enquirer
seven days a week and the New York Times Monday-Saturday. Last
Wednesday, the Enquirer arrived but the Times didn’t. Times call center
people in Iowa promised a replacement paper by 2 p.m. We’re still
waiting.

Thursday, there was no Times for the second day and, instead of a replacement
Wednesday paper, the Enquirer carrier tossed a copy of the Wall Street
Journal.

I can’t invent this stuff. The WSJ is the only serious challenger facing the Times as a national daily.

Times
people in Iowa promised a replacement Thursday paper. I’ve called so
many times I can recite their script with them, including faux sincerity
when apologizing for missed papers.

I
also sent another note to the circulation VP at the Times, using the
email address on the paper’s website. (I couldn’t find any such person
or email in the online list of Enquirer contacts. No surprise.)

The
Times circulation VP couldn’t happy about paying to deliver the WSJ. An
aide called, saying he’d do all he could by phone. Not much. Actually,
nothing.

Friday, finally, the Enquirer carrier got it right: Enquirer and Times. That can’t last. The lapses are not new.

•Questions
are being raised about foreign research involving UC and Henry
Heimlich. UC News Record reporter Benjamin Goldschmidt said, “The study
tested whether or not a modified version of the Heimlich Maneuver could
stop an acute asthma attack or treat asthma symptoms without
contemporary treatment. The subjects’ parents gave consent and the
results reported no adverse effects, according to the study. The 67
children who participated were between the ages of six and 16.”

Goldschmidt
said Heimlich’s son, Peter, is pressing the inquiry at UC and
elsewhere. The younger Heimlich said that “Since at least 1996, based on
dubious evidence, my father has claimed that the Heimlich Maneuver can
stop asthma attacks, but asthma experts have expressed strong doubts . .
. For example, in 2005, Loren Greenway, administrative director of
respiratory and pulmonary medicine for Intermountain Health Care in Salt
Lake City, told a reporter that using the Heimlich maneuver in an acute
asthmatic condition … could actually kill somebody.”

Peter
Heimlich said he targeted UC because Charles Pierce, adjunct professor
of psychiatry at UC, was involved with applying for loans for the study
in Barbados, an Atlantic nation between Haiti and Venezuela. He cited
email correspondence in the Winkler Center’s Heimlich Archives at UC.

The
News Record quoted UC spokesman Greg Hand, who said the majority of
Pierce’s work is done at Children’s Hospital, not with UC.

Previously,
Peter Heimlich raised questions about his father’s foreign experiments
on malariotherapy, which seeks to prove that infecting people with
malaria creates HIV-killing fevers.

•If you missed it, find last week’s page 1 New York Post photo of a man about to be killed by a subway train.

Freelance
photographer R. Umar Abbasi said it is one of dozens he shot using his
flash unsuccessfully to alert the driver about an emergency. A furor
followed the Post’s decision to print his photo.

Photographers frequently are faulted for not intervening in violent or deadly situations. So let me offer a couple comments.

First,
Abbasi had no duty to try to lift Ki-Suck Han to safety. He says he
wasn’t close enough, the train was coming, he was unsure whether he
could lift the man. Others, closer, did not try to help.

Whether
photographers should set aside their cameras and get involved is a
recurrent question. My answer is this: The greater the risk, the smaller
the obligation to help. That’s how we get images of wounded and dying
soldiers, people trapped in or rescued from bombed buildings, prisoners
being shot, stabbed, torture, etc.

That’s
what photographers do. They show us what’s happening and in many
situations, photographers would have been casualties if they’d try to
intervene.

An
older colleague at the Minneapolis Star said a woman who survived the
collapse of a downtown hotel complained that he photographed her instead
of helping. My colleague sent her an autographed copy of the photo,
inscribed, I recall, “Deadlines are deadlines, lady.”

Second,
the Post wasn’t wrong to publish the photo. I’m on the side of showing
what happens when things go very, very wrong. War is ugly. So are
traffic accidents, trench cave-ins and shootings here. Sanitizing does
no service to readers/viewers who need to know what happened in a
newsworthy event. Is the photo disturbing? Yes. But not so much as
Ki-Suck Han’s death at the hands of a stranger who pushed him on to the
tracks.

•Photographers
often spend their lives known for one news photo: Marines raising the
flag on Mt. Suribachi, a young woman screaming over the body of a
student at Kent State, a starving Sudanese child watched by a nearby
vulture, a South Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong suspect with
one shot to the head. Some images win famous prizes. Some photographers
build careers on their moments. At least one, Kevin Carter, bedeviled
by what he’d seen among Sudanese famine victims, killed himself. Abbasi
will not easily shake the image of his image of that subway death.

•The
Dec. 8 Economist online has a cautious update on the declining
newspaper industry, including Gannett, owner of the Enquirer. Included
is a look at the ways pay walls like that at the Enquirer are succeeding
where online content long was free. At some papers, online income
finally is seriously compensating for income from lost print ad
revenue. But the Economist warns “Most important, a paper’s content has
to be worth paying for, which is bad news for (unnamed) papers that
have cost-cut themselves into journalistic wraiths.”

•I
love a journalistic hoax. A top Chinese daily, People’s Daily, reported
that “The Onion has named North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un as
the sexiest man alive for the year 2012.”

Obviously
unaware that the Onion is an American satirical website, Chinese
editors copied it verbatim: “With his devastatingly handsome, round
face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this
Pyongyang-bred heartthrob is every woman's dream come true. Blessed with
an air of power that masks an unmistakable cute, cuddly side, Kim made
this newspaper's editorial board swoon with his impeccable fashion
sense, chic short hairstyle, and, of course, that famous smile.”

•Radio
pranks are nothing new. Years ago, when WNOP “Radio Free Newport”
broadcast from an Ohio River barge, it would play recordings of prank
telephone calls. One was to a railroad asking if the caller could use
its engine roundhouse to play a huge Bobby Breen U.S. Steel record.
Another asked a department store lingerie clerk about an Erin go Bragh,
and I think, a Freudian slip. A supermarket customer insisted he
properly assembled his “chicken parts kit” but it would only fly
backwards. What should he do? The “Green Hornet” called a garage,
supposedly servicing his Black Beauty car to ask when his Filipino
houseboy Kato could pick it up. Finally, there was the soldier who
called a McDonald’s with a detailed order for an entire Army reserve or
national guard unit. The laughs, of course, came as recipients of the
calls struggled to make sense of the queries until they realized they’d
been had.

•Sometimes,
however, a clever media hoax goes sadly wrong. That’s apparently what
happened last week when Australian radio DJs Mel Greig and Michael
Christian fooled nurses at London’s King Edward VII Hospital into thinking they were the Queen and Prince Charles. They wanted to know how Kate was handling her severe morning sickness.

In
an early morning telephone call, Greig, impersonating the Queen, said:
“Oh, hello there. Could I please speak to Kate please, my
granddaughter?”

Thinking
she was speaking to the Queen, immigrant nurse Jacintha Saldanha, on
switchboard duty, replied; “Oh yes, just hold on ma’am.”

She
put the call through to the nurse in the Duchess’ room. That nurse, so
far unnamed, also thought she was speaking to the Queen and provided
details about Kate’s health.

The
Sydney station, 2Day, heavily promoted its prank and broadcast it
repeatedly. It became an international sensation; even the real Prince
Charles was reported to have thought it funny.

Nurse
Saldanha was found dead Friday, three days later. London police said
they are not treating her death as suspicious. That means suicide or
natural causes. British news media assumed suicide, suggesting Saldanha
couldn’t deal with humiliation after 2Day’s recording of her
embarrassing error went viral. The London Telegraph said “the two
presenters who made the call will be questioned by Australian police
following a request by Scotland Yard, which will gather evidence for an
inquest.”

•Elizabeth
P. McIntosh was a Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter writing for women in
1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7. Editors killed
her story, saying her graphic description of civilian victims would be
too upsetting. Last week, the Washington Post published the uncut story
with McIntosh’s recollections. It’s vivid, fine reporting, the kind of
writing we seldom see today.

•An
inexplicable failure of journalism honesty landed NBC in court. George
Zimmerman, who admits he shot and killed unarmed Florida teenager
Trayvon Martin, sued the network. He says NBC editing of his original
911 call defamed him and caused intentional infliction of emotional
distress.

NBC
played the its reporter’s edited tape three times. On it, Zimmerman
says, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or
something. He looks black.”

But
on the unedited tape, Zimmerman says, “This guy looks like he’s up to no
good or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking
around, looking about.”

Then the 911 dispatcher says, “OK and this guy — is he white, black or Hispanic.”

Only then, in response, Zimmerman said, “He looks black.”

Neither
the dispatcher’s question nor Zimmerman’s answer was racist. If a
police officer was to be dispatched, it was important what the potential
suspect, Trayvon Martin, looked like.

•Here’s
a story I haven’t seen as we edge up to the fiscal cliff: how many
billions are spent on fully employed people whose wages are so low that
employers transfer their costs to the rest of us? Medicaid, food stamps,
etc. aren’t limited to the unemployed or aged. And while they’re at it,
reporters can tell us how much a full-time worker must earn to equal all
of their taxpayer-supported benefits.

•And
now, a birther alert. Ted Cruz, newly elected Hispanic and perfectly
conservative senator from Texas, says his Canadian birth doesn’t
disqualify him from a run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.
He told Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, “The Constitution requires that
one be a natural-born citizen and my mother was a U.S. citizen when I
was born.” He could have added that
Americans captured Canada 200 years ago in the War of 1812, assuring
Donald Trump of Cruz’s eligibility. And hey! Americans then defeated
Santa Ana at the Alamo.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

Their
highly accurate texts were created without seeing the scrolls and they
shattered secrecy created by a cabal of scholars who for decades
restricted other researchers’ and translators’ access to the ancient
documents.

Steve
Rosen’s recent Page 1 story in the Enquirer got that right. The other
scoop was my 1991 Enquirer story reporting Wacholder and Abegg’s
triumph. Our photo showed visually impaired Wacholder looking at a
dramatically enlarged image on a Mac.

Their
ordeal had its origin in a promise by then-HUC president Nelson Glueck
in 1969. He agreed to house 1000-plus photographic images of the scrolls
lest something happen to the originals. He also agreed with scholars
controlling access to the scrolls that no one else would see the HUC
negatives while the original scrolls existed.

That
included Wacholder. To his frustration, HUC honored that promise even
after Glueck’s death and despite the growing international controversy
over restricted scholarly access to many of the original scrolls.

Today’s Biblical Archaeology Society website, biblicalarchaeology.org,
recalled how Wacholder and Abegg got lucky in 1989. Chief editor of the
scrolls John Strugnell sent a copy of a secret concordance of the Dead
Sea Scrolls to Wacholder. It “consisted of photocopies of index cards
on which every word in the unpublished scrolls was listed, including its
location and the few words surrounding it.” It was their Rosetta
Stone.

Wacholder
and Abegg programmed the Mac to apply their knowledge of ancient
literature to the data in the concordance. "I'm sick and tired of all
this waiting," he told me at the time.

In
1991, the society’s Biblical Archaeology Review published the
reconstructions, breaking the more-than-40-year-old monopoly on the
scrolls.

And
when jealous scholars challenged the accuracy of the reconstructions,
Wacholder was dismissive. "I'll match my knowing of the . . . texts -
even blind — any of them.

Wacholder
died last year. Abegg became professor and co-director of the Dead Sea
Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University in British Columbia.

•I’ve
described my fear that the Cleveland Plain Dealer — long Ohio’s best
daily — will follow other Advance Publications into print obscurity. PD
journalists also heard the clatter of bean counters and created the
Save The Plain Dealer campaign. Earlier this year, Advance — another
name for Newhouse family publications — the New Orleans
Times-Picayune as a traditional daily. It fired lots of journalists and
now is printed three days a week to accommodate heavy advertising.
Surviving journalists also work online every day. With that innovation,
Newhouse made New Orleans America’s largest city without a daily paper.
Smaller Advance dailies suffered the same fate. Poynter.com quoted an email from PD science writer John Mangels earlier this month:

“The
multi­media campaign will begin Sunday with a half­-page ad in The Plain
Dealer, to be followed by bus and billboard ads throughout the city. TV
and radio ads will appear soon. There will be mass mailings and e­
mailings to elected officials, political and business leaders and other
people of influence. We’ll have a Facebook page with an abundance of
content, a petition on Change.org,
and a Twitter feed. We’re also working to organize community forums
where we’ll discuss the future of journalism in Northeast Ohio, and the
potential impact of the loss of the daily paper and much of its
experienced news­gathering staff.”

Later,
reached by phone, Mangels told Poynter that PD management hasn’t said
anything about Advance’s plans. “The only detail that we’ve been told by
our bosses here is that major changes are coming, layoffs in some
number are coming,” Mangels said.

•Have
you noticed how GOP aspirants for the 2016 presidential nomination are
using long-reviled mainstream news media (MSM) to distance themselves
from Romney and his disdain for retirees, veterans, Hispanics, African
Americans, and young adults? I love the GOP’s irony deficit. They’ve
spent decades teaching True Believers that the MSM is an evil, liberal
cabal, not to be trusted. Now, these same Republican 40-somethings want
voters to believe what the mainstream news media tell them about their
aspirations and sagacity. They’re also fleeing Romney’s transparent
hypocrisy and its blowback; benefits to Democratic constituencies are
meant to buy votes but benefits for GOP constituencies never, ever
should be understood as a way to woo financial support or votes.

•Here’s
an angle I haven’t encountered in post-election coverage: an almost
inevitable GOP win in 2016. Not only is a second elected term unusual
for modern Democratic presidents, but a third term for either party is
rare. Since FDR in 1940, only popular Republican Ronald Reagan was
succeeded by a Republican, George H. W. Bush. I’m not alone if my
reading to liberal columnists is a fair indicator of grudging agreement.
They want Obama to push through agendas they’ve advocated for the past
four years and to find the cajones to fight for his nominations when
they go before the Senate led by Kentucky Pride Mitch McConnell.

•Propaganda-laden
cable news and TV/radio talk shows can lull angry, fearful partisans
and voters into believing what facts refute. And I mean refute not
rebut. Anything out of sync with those GOP media was rejected as MSM
bias. Whether it was a Pavlovian response, delusional thinking or
magical realism, the result was Republican candidates, consultants,
strategists, voters and Fox News were stunned when state after state
went for Obama. Carl Rove went into a spin of denial on Fox News as
election returns came in; he believed what Fox News had been telling him
for months: Romney in a walk. What was that cliche, something about
drinking the Kool-aid?

• This
from Eric Alterman in his What Liberal Media? column in The Nation:
“They watched Fox News, read The Wall Street Journal, clicked on Drudge
and the Daily Caller, and listened to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Hugh
Hewitt, Karl Rove, Dick Morris and Peggy Noonan promise them that their
Kenyan/Muslim/socialist/terrorist nightmare was nearly over. One
election was all that stood between them and a country without capital
gains taxes, pollution regulation, healthcare mandates, gay marriage and
abortions for rape victims.”

Alterman
continued: “The less wonderful irony involves the supporting role the
mainstream media played in this un-reality show. Post-truth politics
reached a new pinnacle this year as major MSM machers admitted to
a lack of concern with the veracity of the news their institutions
reported. ‘It’s not our job to litigate [the facts] in the paper,’ New
York Times national editor Sam Sifton told the paper’s public editor,
Margaret Sullivan, regarding phony Republican ‘voter fraud’ allegations.
‘We need to state what each side says.’ ‘The truth? C’mon, this is a
political convention’ was the headline over a column by Glenn Kessler,
the Washington Post ‘fact-checker.’ Yes, you read that right.”

How
bad was it? Alterman quoted Steve Benen, a blogger and Rachel Maddow
Show producer. He “counted fully 917 false statements made by Mitt
Romney during 2012. Just about the truest words to come out of the
campaign were those of the Romney pollster who explained, ‘We’re not
going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.’ But not only
did many members of the MSM give Romney a pass on his serial lying; they
actually endorsed his candidacy on the assumption that we need not take
seriously any of those statements the candidate had felt compelled to
make in order to win the nomination of his party.”

•In
the expanding universe of online calumny, few American public officials
or public figures strike back big time in part because of broad First
Amendment protections available to defamers. British libel law makes
it much easier for the victim to win. The latest target of false online
vilification is Lord Alistair McAlpine. BBC implicated but didn’t name
him in its spreading child abuse scandal. However, so little was left to
the imagination that in Britain’s media/politics hothouse that McAlpine
was named in myriad tweets.

BBC
quickly admitted error and paid him almost $300,000 to salve his bruised
feelings. ITV — Britain’s Independent Television — followed BBC with
apology and more than $200,000 for inadvertently accusing McAlpine of
abusing children.

McAlpine
is offering to accept a tweeted apology and modest payment from most of
the tweeters. He’s less forgiving of 20 members of Parliament,
journalists and other public officials and figures. They probably face
costly libel actions in a country where it’s almost impossible for a
defendant to win.

•Assume
every microphone in front of you is “on.” You don’t warm up with
“There once was a man from Nantucket . . . “ on the assumption that mic
is dead. Myriad public figures have ignored that Law of the Jungle to
their pain. The latest is Jonathan Sacks, Orthodox chief rabbi of Great
Britain, who delivers a “Thought for the Day” regularly on BBC radio’s
Today program.

Here’s
the Telegraph report and another statement from the overworked BBC
apology machine. After Sacks finished and apparently assumed his mic
was turned off, host Evan Davis asked, “Jonathan, before you go, you
know, any thoughts on what’s going on over in Israel and Gaza at the
moment?”

Lord Sacks sighed, before replying: “I think it has got to do with Iran, actually.”

Cohost
Sarah Montague realized Sacks did not seem to know his remarks were
being broadcast and she could be heard to whisper: “We, we’re live.”

Lord
Sacks adopted a more formal broadcasting manner and suggested the
crisis demanded “a continued prayer for peace, not only in Gaza but for
the whole region. No-one gains from violence. Not the Palestinians, not
the Israelis. This is an issue here where we must all pray for peace and
work for it.”

Later,
BBC apologized for catching Sacks off-guard. A spokesman said: “The
Chief Rabbi hadn’t realized he was still on-air and as soon as this
became apparent, we interjected. (Host) Evan likes to be spontaneous
with guests but he accepts that in this case it was inappropriate and he
has apologized to Lord Sacks. The BBC would reiterate that apology.”

•So
far, I haven’t found a news angle beyond prurience in the Petraeus
resignation. Yes, there could have been a national security issue, but
once then-spymaster Petraeus went public about his extramarital affair,
he couldn’t be blackmailed. We’ll never know how well the CIA would
have run under Petraeus, but turning it further into an almost
unaccountable paramilitary force with its fleet of deadly drones killing
Americans abroad and others would not have been in the national
interest. We need a good spy agency. Killing people you’re trying to
subvert and convert is a lousy game plan.

•Admiring
and available women are no stranger to powerful public and corporate
leaders. Generals are no exception. Neither are social climbers hoping
to use them. All that’s missing from the Petraeus soap opera is for
some just-married junior officer to claim his general exercised droit du
seigneur.

•We
can wonder what their frequently mentioned Lebanese origins have to do
with the Tampa twins’ roles in the Petraeus soap opera, or whether
Paula’s arms are fitter and better displayed than Michele’s. After that,
let’s get to the fun stuff: the ease with which law enforcement obtains
our emails.

•And
a belated Thanksgiving note. Somehow, I found a turkey on the
Copperbelt in Central Africa where I was editing the new daily Zambia
Times. I did my best to explain how to roast it with stuffing to the
cook in the house I was caring for. He served it that evening with
obvious pride. It was brown, roasted over open coal on a spit he’d
tended for hours. The stuffing was special beyond my dreams: the
sonofabitch had used the kosher salami I’d hoarded for months for
stuffing. I thanked and praised him through clenched teeth and dug in.
It was memorable. And awful.